ramadan traffic

Lest you think I've exaggerated about the traffic, here are some statistics:

Between Dubai and Abu Dhabi (population around 1 million) 20,000 speeding tickets were issued the first 10 days of ramadan.

There were approximately 600 traffic accidents the first 10 days of ramadan in Abu Dhabi.

3,000 people were ticketed for not wearing seat belts. The whole seat belt thing is a big deal here. No one wears them, and the old taxis don't even have them. But statistics have shown people in the back seat get injured just as badly as those in the front if not wearing their seat belts. There are posters all over Abu Dhabi of nascar drivers urging people to wear their seat belts.

Probably the most horrifying thing I've seen in traffic is a children's school bus, on a service road that runs parallel to the highway, cross over the median (which was not a small median, but more like a big concrete curb, with 5 feet of grass, and then another curb down to the highway), and pull right into highway traffic going about 50 miles slower than everyone else. The incident is worse than you might be thinking because most of the buses here have folding chairs that are not bolted to the floor. There is a big effort underway to fix this problem (I mean seriously, they build islands for no reason, but can't provide school buses that are safe for children?) but the effort won't be completed until 2012.

The good thing is the weather has been slowing cooling down. It's only 100 degrees outside right now. Did I just say that?